Have You Forgotten Yet?: The First World War Memoirs of C. P. Blacker
These are the wonderfully vivid memoirs of the Great War of 1914-18
by Blacker, who was an 18-year-old undergraduate when the war
began, served for a year as an orderly in a Belgian hospital, and
then rose to command a company of the Coldstream Guards and
received a Military Cross for his endeavours. In World War II he
received a George Medal: an unusual pair of decorations for
gallantry, but he was not a usual man. Condensed from a much longer
manuscript by his son, Blacker originally wrote it long after the
events it describes. Clear and easy to read, it brings back with
stunning force how awful - and yet how necessary - that war's
slaughter was. Blacker relied partly on a remarkable memory, partly
on diaries and letters written at the time. He had an eye for the
ordinariness of war: the relative worth of a blanket and a British
warm overcoat on a chilly night; the wail of shells, the ubiquity
of mud. He also had a keen eye for birds and flowers, when there
were any to be seen. A Few months' timber work in the Foret de
Clairmarais gave him an inner peace he found he could carry forward
onto the battlefield of the Somme. His only sibling, a younger
brother, was killed in 1915; he reflected often on the probability
of life after death, and came to accept his own mortality calmly.
He describes what it feels like to be badly wounded, and to see
one's friends blown to pieces; pouring out in retrospect what
soldiers on the front line tried to keep from their families and
thus adding to what we can know of the real nature of war. In an
appendix are hitherto unpublished letters by Shaw and Kipling.
Review by M R D FOOT (Kirkus UK)
